Over the past several days, two stories have highlighted the critical condition state of American public education. As the New York Times detailed, K12 school budgets in over 30 states have yet to return to their pre-recession, 2008 levels. Of the seven with the deepest reductions, six--Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Wisconsin--made matters […]

From the very beginning of the debate over what would become the Affordable Care Act, the conservative crusade to kill health care reform has been defined by an inescapable irony. For years, health care has been worst in those reddest of states where Republicans poll best. Study after study has shown that red state health […]

Jeb Bush, the 2016 GOP White House hopeful tells us, loves his brother. But judging by his recent statements, he apparently loves the idea of being president even more. Confronted by Dubya's dismal record at home and abroad, Jeb ultimately denied the Iraq war was a mistake and comically claimed "ISIS didn't exist when my […]

With the loss of Ramadi to ISIS forces, the Republican Party has launched one of its most ambitious myth-making operations in recent memory: Barack Obama lost Iraq. "We had the conflict won," John McCain declared this week, "thanks to the surge." Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and the Project for a New American Century […]

There's an old Monty Python sketch in which a "Face the Press" interviewer grills the Minister for Home Affairs: "You claimed that you would build 88,000 million, billion houses a year in the Greater London area alone. In fact, you've built only three in the last fifteen years. Are you a bit disappointed with this […]

Just one week after a 19 year-old college student rightly informed Jeb Bush that "your brother created ISIS," the 2016 GOP White House hopeful apparently decided one historical beat down wasn't enough. At a gathering in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Wednesday, Dubya's brother doubled down and declared: "ISIS didn't exist when my brother was president. […]

It must be tough being the brother of the man who is responsible for the world-historical disaster that was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It's tougher still to try to replace him as the next Republican president of the United States. This week, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush found that out the hard way. Mocked […]

Knowing what he knows now about the reaction to his statement that knowing what he knows now he would still have gone into Iraq, Jeb Bush on Friday comically reversed course on his brother's 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even more side-splitting have been the responses of Jeb's rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Casually […]

As you may have heard, Florida Senator and 2016 GOP White House hopeful Marco Rubio delivered a major address Wednesday on foreign policy and national security. Wanting to learn more about his so-called "Rubio Doctrine," I visited his web site to see what he had to say. As it turned out, I didn't need to […]

While investigators are working to understand the causes of the deadly Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia, the Republicans' best and brightest are adding insult to injury. On Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines to slash $260 million from Amtrak funding. Meanwhile, David Frum, the man who brought you "the Axis of Evil," […]